Earth Notes: Greenstripping the West’s Grasslands

Today, the West’s amber waves of grass are more often than not a species land managers cringe to see. Cheatgrass, a Eurasian species that most likely arrived on ships a century ago, now runs across millions of acres of the Intermountain West and Colorado Plateau.

Burning cheatgrass, a plant species heavily disliked by land managers.

Credit USDA Forest Service

Listen

Listening...

/

2:04

It outcompetes natives—and is perfect fuel for wildfire. Cheatgrass dries to a crispy-fine tinder just as fire season arrives, forming a continuous fuel that’s feeding hotter and more frequent fires into surrounding trees and shrubs.

A self-fulfilling cheatgrass-fire cycle has resulted. To break that cycle, managers are experimenting with a method called greenstripping: long, narrow bands of native perennials planted between swaths of cheatgrass.

This summer greenstrips are being tested on the west side of the Kaibab Plateau as part of the Kane and Two Mile Research and Stewardship Partnership. Ideally, species selected for planting are fire resilient, drought tolerant, and palatable to wildlife and domestic stock.

On the Kaibab, warm-season natives will be sown. Still, lots of questions remain: How wide should the strips be? How should the seeds be planted? Broadcast seeding will be done on the Kaibab, but drill seeding is an option in other locales. And it may take several years until enough moisture is present to firmly establish the new plants.

Greenstrips could buy time for firefighters, and keep fires smaller. In the longer term, these verdant bands may help restore degraded rangelands, and finally gain traction against the troublesome cheatgrass.

Related Content

When it comes to controlling the many non-native, invasive plants in northern Arizona, weed warriors call on every tactic in the book. As they seek to minimize the spread of a weed called diffuse knapweed, they’re turning to a tiny ally: a weevil that loves to eat knapweed seeds.

Diffuse knapweed is a low-growing shrub that originated on the Russian steppes. Since the 1980's, it’s taken over roadsides and pastures in the region. It’s a heavy seed producer and a tough competitor against native plants.

They’re sometimes called fish eagles, for good reason: their diet is almost all live fish. They’re big raptors, hard to miss soaring above the scattered rivers and lakes of the Southwest’s high country. They’re ospreys, birds that belong to the summer skies of the Colorado Plateau.

Few sounds in nature are as instantly recognizable and terrifying as the sudden rattle of a pit viper. No matter how often you’ve heard it, it’s a sound that sends a jolt of adrenaline and raises the hair on the back of the neck.

But look closely, because maybe what you’re hearing isn’t a rattlesnake at all.

It might instead be a close mimic, a gopher snake. With their speckled, earth-tone appearance, these common snakes look something like rattlesnakes, but they aren’t dangerous. In fact, they are highly beneficial and eat large numbers of rodents.